SOURCE: “Ruined,” in Film Comment, Vol. 29, No. 6, November–December, 1993, p. 73.

In the following review, Chang describes the history behind Egoyan's Calendar and explores the film's major plot elements.

Atom Egoyan won the Moscow Prize for The Adjuster in 1991. The award took the form of one million rubles in production funding and came with the stipulation that the work be done in the (then) Soviet Union. As location, Egoyan chose Armenia, his ancestral home—then saw his budget devalued, by secession and independence, to some ＄4,000 U.S. Last-minute assistance from German television allowed him to get on the plane with a limited budget, strict completion timeline, no script, and three ideas: 1) The film would be improvised. 2) A photographer on assignment shoots images of churches for a calendar. 3) A relationship disintegrates. As a friend of mine remarked, “All filmmakers should be forced to work this way.”

In Calendar, Egoyan himself...